


Make the Leap

by Griffy (honklust)



Category: Metalocalypse (Cartoon)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Drug Use, Flashbacks, Fluff, Implied/Referenced Abuse, M/M, f-slur, hand holding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-24
Updated: 2018-08-24
Packaged: 2019-07-01 23:01:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15783891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honklust/pseuds/Griffy
Summary: He's tired, but he can't sleep. He's been through so much.





	Make the Leap

**Author's Note:**

> Nickles is back babie

Hush, hush, hush hush--

He’s breathing beside him, chest rising and falling like the waves, pale blue in the light from the wall-length aquarium. He can see the shadows of fish as they swim past, lazy, lazy, lazy.

Pickles has never been one for this sappy shit. That said, laying here besides Nathan, letting the burble of the aquarium filters fill up the room alongside the slow, quiet wheeze of his breathing… Maybe this is fine. Maybe he could get used to this. 

Nathan’s eyes are deep-sunk in his skull, cast in sweet, menacing shadows as he sleeps. Pickles wonders if the death paint isn’t staining his skin. He doesn’t figure he minds if it does - that’d be pretty sick, anyways.

He should sleep, he knows, but his fingers are twitchy and he’s kind of itchy for a drink or a needle or a bump or something and he wishes, not for the first time but perhaps the most urgently, that he didn’t always need to fill himself up with something synthetic. He wishes he wasn’t already starting to get the shakes even though he’d downed an entire liter of vodka tonic an hour ago, he wishes that maybe… Maybe he hadn’t fucked himself up so bad.

He closes his eyes, and behind his lids he sees himself - eighteen and crammed into a pair of tight snakeskin pants, hair as big as a fucking lions mane, every agent for miles breathing hornily down his neck, desperate in equal parts for his ass and for the money he would most assuredly make them.

He’s really just a kid but he’s doing expensive cocaine of the back of a toilet seat in a cheap hotel, and there’s a man in the doorway, a man he hadn’t spoken to in years, a man whose eyes had been dark, empty --

And he looks up and it’s Nathan there, and instead of that sickening twist of “oh, I shouldn’t be doing this,” he’s filled with a confusing, horrible warmth, a feeling that might just be love but it’s misplaced here - not the right time, not the right place.

He finds himself sitting up straight, chest heaving, the nightmare (dream??) whatever had only lasted seconds but he was already shaken and he felt weird, felt like his skin was going to slide right off his muscles and slither out the fucking doorway. Felt like there were ants crawling underneath his fatty tissue. 

This is all too much for him, all these feelings. There had been a headrush at first, a high like he’d felt when he first left his house, barely out of tenth grade and screaming at the top of his lungs, guitar strapped to his back. (“Yeah, dad, I am a fuckin’ faggot! Got yourself a fuckin’ fag kid and I’m gonna make more goddamned money than you’ll ever see in your miserable fuckin’ life, gonna get so much cash just _faggin’ it up out there,_ then we’ll fuckin’ see whose beggin’ who to come home! Fuck you! Fuckin’ die, ya old fuck! Fuck!”)  
He keeps getting sidetracked from the fucking issue at hand, like his brain is stuck in rewind, choosing moment to flashback to every stupid (important, fantastic) decision he’s ever made. He looks down at Nathan again, at the hair on his chest, at the way his fingers are curled tight in the dark sheets, tense even now, even in sleep.

He reaches out, hand shaking desperately, looking bone-pale in the wavering blue light, and lays his fingers over Nathan’s. 

He’s twenty-something and the rest of SnB is there, every last one of the fucking idiots doped off their asses, too high to go on stage, and Sammy looks like he’s just about to need to go to the fucking ER for the fourth time in three days and he just. He can’t do it anymore. He can’t keep killing himself like this, not while these assholes do it alongside him. He knows, looking into the glazed, stupid eyes of his bandmates, that his days in this place are more than fucking numbered.

Nathan grumbles, shifts, closes his hand over Pickles’s. His nails are black - fresh coat of paint - and Pickles feels his heart jump into his throat, his head spinning desperately, and he wonders, for a moment, if this is it. If this is his newest foray into the unknown, if this is going to be the moment that makes the next ten years.

Fuck. God. He doesn’t care. He’s willing to take the chance.


End file.
